


the carving knife

by jaekyu



Category: GOT7
Genre: Alternate Universe, Blood and Injury, F/M, For a little bit not the whole time, Girl!Jinyoung, Oral Sex, POV Alternating, POV Second Person, POV Third Person Omniscient, Porn With Plot, mostly it's in
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-12
Updated: 2018-09-12
Packaged: 2019-07-11 06:31:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15966665
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jaekyu/pseuds/jaekyu
Summary: I slithered here from Eden just to sit outside your door.The passing of two ships in the night.





	the carving knife

 

 

> _The small hours open their wounds for me. This is a woman's confession: I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me._
> 
>   
>  \- SIMONE MUENCH

 

 

 

**I. THE STRANGER**

She meets him on the steps of the apartment building they share. It’s late and she’s on her way home from work. If not for the light of the street lamps the night may have swallowed her whole.

She still smells like antiseptic from the hospital. The kind of odor that is unmistakable and unshakable once you smell it - because the world will always work to find every untainted thing and have it ruined as fast as it can.

He sits on the stairs, smoking a cigarette. He’s all spread out, not looking at her, long limbs reaching from railing to railing.

“Hi,” her voice is spread-thin from long hours of work. But still, it carries, and he looks up from the space between his knees to finally notice her. “You live here, too?”

“Yeah,” is his reply. The lit end of his cigarette burns bright red as if it’s trying to imitate the sun. “Third floor, first door on the left.”

She gestures to the highest window on the front of the building. “All the way up there,” she tells him, “that’s me.”

He follows her gaze up the fire escape, finds a window draped in red fabric and a small potted plant sitting on the windowsill. “I don’t know many other people who live here,” he turns back to her.

“Me neither,” she shuffles two steps closer, proffers her open palm. “Jinyoung.”

He stubs his cigarette out against the curb, takes her hand. “Jaebum,” he replies.

And there it is: the ripened fruit and the carving knife to cleave it open.

 

 

**II. KITH & KIN **

Jaebum imagines things the way he might retell them to his mother:

Yes, I’m doing fine. Yes, I got the money you sent me, I used it for groceries. I’m sorry I don’t call more. No, Dad hasn’t called. I don’t know if it’s worth it. There’s this nurse who lives above me, she seems nice. I met her the other night. She’s my age but she looks a lot younger. No, we just talked on the stairs outside once. And again, this time in the elevator. I held the door open for her on my way in after I picked up those groceries I told you about -- I don’t know. Mom. I miss you too. Yeah, I got Grandma’s birthday gift. Yeah, I’m gonna pick her up a thank you card. It’s okay. The window sticks so sometime it can get stuffy. I’m gonna talk to my landlord about it. No, Mom, don’t worry about it.

Yeah, I love you too. Goodnight.

 

 

**III. ROOMS ON FIRE**

Her kitchen is smaller, even with the butcher block table that sits in the middle of his. She doesn’t mind, she tells him, she’s not around much to cook anyway.

“Where do you work?” Jaebum asks. She asked him not to smoke in her apartment even though the landlord doesn’t mind. He’s not asshole, she’s a nurse and he knows it’s bad for him, so he wouldn’t protest. Now in view of a book of matches that sit on her countertop, probably meant for lighting candles, his fingers twitch against the fabric of his jeans.

“The hospital,” Jinyoung answers. She opens a cupboard, up on her tiptoes, and Jaebum can see it; how odd she looks in her own space. Like a puzzle with a piece fit into it wrong. “The one down the street. In the Trauma Center.”

“Do you like it?”

“It’s,” she pauses to considers the answer. “It’s work.”

In her cupboard she finds her French Press, her bag of whole coffee beans and the machine she uses to grind them away. “It must be hard work,” Jaebum continues.

“It’s,” Jinyoung starts and stops again. She looks at the thing she’s lined up on her counter, lip caught between her teeth. She wants to tell the truth but how do you quantify how much of something is the truth if you’re not even sure what the whole truth is. “Sometimes,” she settles on, “sometimes it’s really hard work.”

She does hear Jaebum approach her, or feel him once he’s close enough for there to only be an exhale of space between them. Jinyoung doesn’t notice until he puts his hand over hers where it rests against the curve of her counter.

“If you need anything,” Jaebum says, and maybe he doesn’t mean it, but when he says it it feels like he means it. “If you need anything, let me know.”

Jinyoung slides her hand out from under Jaebum’s, she convinces herself she doesn’t mind the press of it so she doesn’t jerk it away and make it obvious. But she doesn’t look at him and that might be a much more obvious tell. Avoiding the gaze of your opponent when in your hand your holding a Royal Flush.

Jinyoung thinks she is so aware, now, whereas before she wasn’t aware at all now her mind is catching up and overcompensating. She thinks if someone asked she could draw this scene with her eyes closed; the tiny corner of her tiny kitchen, the tiny space between her and Jaebum, the tiny twitch of Jaebum’s fingers against the wood of her countertops, on a spot just a moment ago occupied by her hand. And maybe if she had left it, his finger would have twitched against her bare skin, and it would have meant something different. But Jaebum’s hand is merely against the wood and so it doesn’t mean anything.

“Do you,” she asks him, “do you want some coffee?”

Something is left hanging between them; a loose thread left unpulled. And neither of them realize it, at the time, but they both decide to give the other the time of think on it. Then they’ll come back to it.

 

 

**VI. WERE YOU LYING THEN OR ARE YOU LYING NOW?**

Before you moved here you almost got married.

You thought you knew what love was and so you thought you loved someone. He was all the good things they told you a good husband should be when you were growing up. Big and strong, handsome enough to make pretty babies with, big hands that touched you like you had replaced the sun at the centre of the universe. He was so good to you. But for some reason that wasn’t enough for you. And you don’t know why it couldn’t be enough for you, there are people who have settled for less, there are people who have tied themselves to worse as a means for survival.

You could have tried to be happy. You didn’t even try to be happy.

At least, that’s what he said. That’s what he said the day you left him.

You think the problem might have been you wanted someone to save you. These days you think you might not be able to be saved or maybe you just aren’t worth saving.

 

 

**V. THE INDENTIONS**

“Did you always want to be a nurse?”

“I never wanted to be a nurse.” Jinyoung says. This is a whole truth and she knows it. Saying it out loud feels like splitting open her breastbone and letting everything fall out. “Everyone else wanted me to be a nurse.”

“Do you always do what everyone else wants you to do?”

The furrow in Jinyoung’s brow mars her whole face, folds it into something harder than Jaebum has ever seen it. It takes the soft curve of Jingyoung’s mouth with it and Jaebum finally notices the points of her cheekbones, the angle of her jaw.

“I don’t know how to do anything else.”

A whole truth.

 

 

**VI. BAD THINGS TO SUCH GOOD PEOPLE**

It’s raining outside the night Jaebum slips with the boning knife, catching the palm of his hand with the edge, ripping the skin open from inner wrist to just below his thumb.

Jinyoung is wet and still in scrubs when she answers her door.

Jaebum’s blood is starting to seep through the kitchen towel he has thrown around his wound. He can feel it sticky and warm creeping into the dip in his elbow, smearing into a map conceived by the wrong kind of cartographer, and soon they may have a trail on the floor made by the same kind of man.

Jinyoung is perturbed from the moment she sees him. “What did you do?” She’s saying like she’s angry but she’s already pulling Jaebum inside, readjusting the towel to put better pressure on it and stop more of the bleeding.

“A knife,” Jaebum confesses. “Wasn’t pay attention.”

“What’s more important than being able to keep your goddamn hand?”

Jaebum wonders if Jinyoung knows how much her hands betray her. They’re steady while they hold Jaebum’s hand over her sink, steady as she runs cold water on it, holds Jaebum’s wrist and he hisses and tries to pull away. Her hands are gentle, next, pushing against the edges of the open skin, pressing, surveying, understand. Her hand is warm when they circle Jaebum’s wrist and she sighs.

She tells him he doesn’t need stitches, he’s a lucky piece of shit that doesn’t need stitches. But he needs to be careful and keep the wound clean, really clean, because a bad enough infection and he could lose the whole hand.

“Why are you staring at me?”

Jaebum doesn’t answer.

 

 

**VII. THE SILENCE**

Why are you staring at me, she says.

And instead of answering he kisses her.

 

 

**VIII. THE PUSH**

You haven’t been kissed in a year. You’re afraid you might have forgotten how to do it. What was it that you did with your hands? What was it that you’re supposed to do, a mouth against your own, warm and soft but insistent. And you’re so worried that you might do the wrong thing you don’t do anything at all.

When he pulls away it’s like it all comes back: lean into it, put one arm around his neck and grip his bicep with the hand of the other. Push your nails into his skin until he bites your lip. Line your hips up as best you can, breathe through your nose, press into him so hard you think you might become apart of him. Let him hold you. Let him touch you. Let him, let him, let him.

“I’m sorry,” he breathes hot against your mouth. “I didn’t want to, I didn’t mean to,” he fumbles, his mouth still so close to yours. Your body wants to lean forward and close the distance again, your head tells you to just listen. “What I mean is - I can stop. If you want.”

And it’s like you told him before: you only know how to do anything but what everyone else wants you to do. But somehow you know you want this, the press and the eventual release, the wind up and the let down, the push and the pull.

“Why would I tell you stop.” You say. It’s not a question. And the weight of him is back and, somehow, it’s more like feeling weightless.

 

 

**IX. A STARVED DOG’S LOGIC ABOUT BONES**

Jaebum props Jinyoung up against her kitchen counters. He’s still bleeding, she’s still dripping with rain water and in her scrubs, but all he can focus is pushing her against the same space of countertop where she had shrunk away from his hand laying on top of hers what feels like an eternity ago.

Her chest rises and falls with her heavy breathing; it pushes her against him and then pulls her away again. A game of cat and mouse, the sharp knife seeking it’s pound of flesh. Jaebum licks into her mouth, grabs the hem of her shirt, hitches it up and holds it up as best he can with his ruined hand.

Jinyoung smells like something Jaebum can’t place. It’s more than the antiseptic she smelled like when they first met, it’s more than Jaebum’s own blood and the growing stain it leaked onto this whole evening. It’s all of that and more, notes of a million different things below the surface, stitched together to make something Jaebum has never smelled and is afraid he may never smell again. He pulls away from Jinyoung’s mouth so he can bury his face in her hair, move his mouth against the patch of skin just below her ear, and breathe in as hard as he can. It’s funny, he thinks, that they’re trapped here and the world just keeps on spinning. Life goes on and no one knows that this moment is happening besides them. They are all at once the centre of the universe and completely hidden from it.

Jaebum bites Jinyoung’s jaw to make her breath hitch in her throat. Then he kisses her again, feels like he has to, while he’s sliding his hand down the front of her soft, flat stomach to find it’s way past the waistband of her pants.

Jinyoung is warm and wet even through her panties. Jaebum presses two fingers against the front of them, just to feel it and just to make Jinyoung’s breath hitch again. His fingers slip against the fabric, push again, pull away, push, pull, push, pull. Jinyoung is shaking now, trembling from head to toe. Jaebum feels a sense of pride; a steady handed nurse come apart at the seems like this for him.

Jinyoung jerks when Jaebum pushes past the elastic of her underwear to feel wet skin, and it’s just about to get good, so good, but Jaebum’s grip slips and his mangled hand slams into the counter, sending shockwaves of pain through his arm.

“Come on,” Jinyoung says, once they’ve straightened out. “It’s okay. Let me clean that for you.”

 

 

**X. THE PULL**

One night a week later you find her in the hallway on the bottom floor on your way home from the bar. You smile at her, breathe out against her neck after you wrap an arm around her waist, resist the urge to kiss her.

“I can smell you,” she tells you and you almost say _I can smell you, too_ , but you realize she’s not done talking yet. “You’re drunk.”

“I am drunk.” You don’t see a reason to lie. “Is that a problem?”  
She doesn’t answer your question. She takes the arm wrapped around her waist so she can examine the hand. “This looks like it’s doing okay,” she says. You’re not sure if she wants an answer. You think she’d know better than you would. “Can you come upstairs? Let me take a look at it properly?”

You’re drunk, just like she said, but you can tell there’s more to the words from the moment she says them. She’s watching your eyes watch her, her fingers delicate against your healing skin. If it had been throbbing before you didn’t notice and you won’t notice now.

You feel like the snake in the garden. Or maybe that’s not the right metaphor. Maybe you’re Adam, with Eve offering you the bright red apple.

 

 

**XI. WHEN THE GOD OF LOVE RETURNS THERE’LL BE HELL TO PAY**

Jaebum’s grip on her waist is hard but not cruel. Jinyoung squirms beneath it all the same. It’s his healing hand clasped around the sharp bone of her hip and his mouth on the skin just to the left and below it. She doesn’t know how many things he would trade just to be able to keep this space. This stretch of skin from the beginning of one thigh to a freckle.

Then Jaebum licks into Jinyoung, the swipe of tongue across her cunt, and decides he may like this part of her body better. It’s hard to decide. So many parts of it are so nice. Like her mouth, hung open and letting out these groans between heavy puffs of air. Like her fingers, delicate and beautiful and caught in Jaebum’s hair now. Tomorrow, who knows what they’ll do. Stitch someone back together, push a needle into skin, fold against one another to make a fist, pushing against someone’s chest, over and over.

For now Jinyoung’s fingers are in Jaebum’s hair and Jaebum’s mouth is on her cunt. Then her fingers are tugging, tugging, tugging, and Jaebum presses the flat of his tongue against Jinyoung’s clit for good measure, before he’s scaling the skyrise of her body and finding her mouth with his again.

Jinyoung straddles him after that, grind her wet and pretty cunt against Jaebum’s cock. It’s almost like he’s fucking her, cock sliding back and forth against Jinyoung’s skin, but he’s not fucking her, so it’s not enough. He wants the incomparable velvety heat only found inside of her.

“Come on,” Jaebum moans. His ruined hand grips her hip a little tighter and then let’s go. “Come on and fuck me.”

Jinyoung sinks onto Jaebum and all of a sudden this one of those moments again. The ones where they are escaped from the universe but these moments have replaced the sun. And they are caught in the orbit of them.

Jinyoung’s body is so taut beneath Jaebum’s hand, his good hand and his bad hand. Two hands meant for two different things, maybe, or following two different paths, meeting for a moment here on a woman who wants Jaebum and Jaebum wants in return.

It’s funny, Jaebum entertains the thought for just a moment, all the ways the world could have kept him from this moment.

And then Jinyoung pulls off of him and finishes him off onto his stomach and Jaebum can’t think of a single thought worth entertaining anymore.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**XII.**

You imagine things the way you might retell them to your mother:

I needed a change of scenery, Mom. No, I know. I’m thinking of taking a vacation. From life, Mom. I can’t remember the last time you were proud of me. No, I know. I’m sorry, Mom. I know you’re just worried, I know you just care about me. I know. I know. I know. I love you too. No, it was fine. Yeah, they fixed the window. No, nothing happened, it was just. No, she was nice, it was just. She was, Mom, maybe you would have liked her. But it was complicated. Yeah, really complicated. I don’t know what happened. I don’t know if it would have been worth it. I’m sorry, again, for everything.

I love you too, Mom. Goodnight.

 

 

**XII.**

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

**Author's Note:**

> closing lines are from "Wild Geese" by Mary Oliver.


End file.
